One step closer to full support for Redis on Windows, MS Open Tech releases 64-bit and Azure installer

I’m happy to report new updates today for Redis on Windows Azure: the open-source, networked, in-memory, key-value data store. We’ve released a new 64-bit version that gives developers access to the full benefits of an extended address space. This was an important step in our journey toward full Windows support. You can download it from the Microsoft Open Technologies github repository.

Last April we announced the release of an important update for Redis on Windows: the ability to mimic the Linux Copy On Write feature, which enables your code to serve requests while simultaneously saving data on disk.

Along with 64-bit support, we are also releasing a Windows Azure installer that enables deployment of Redis on Windows Azure as a PaaS solution using a single command line tool. Instructions on using the tool are available on this page and you can find a step-by-step tutorial here. This is another important milestone in making Redis work great on the Windows and Windows Azure platforms.

We have already received some great feedback from developers interested in using Redis on Windows Azure, so we are committed to an open development process in collaboration to the over 400 Github followers which, among other benefits, will provide more frequent releases.

Now our journey continues with two additional major steps:

- Stress Testing: Our test team spent quite some time testing the code but we need more extensive stress testing that will exercise the new code’s reliability and also guarantee Redis on Windows Azure can be used under significant workload and for an extended period of time before it can be reliably used for production scenarios.

- Redis 2.6: Our development team will be focused in getting the code base up to the latest version on Linux, 2.6. UPDATED 01/22/2013: an alpha version of Redis 2.6 was released today. It has a few known issues, but we expect to have a stable version in a few days.

In addition we want to make easier for developers to deploy Redis by adding support for nuGet and WebPI deployment. We will make these features available very soon.

If you are interested in running Redis on Windows, the best thing you can do is to use this release as much as you can, log bugs and share your comments and suggestions. We also have a long list of features/changes/enhancements that we’re ready to make so let us know if you’re interested in helping - we’re looking for a few more smart developers that want to join our dev team as contributors to the project on Github. Let us know if you want to join the virtual team!

Claudio Caldato Principal Program Manager Lead Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.